The invention can be applied particularly advantageously to detecting and preventing motor vehicle pollution in an urban environment, regardless of whether the pollution is due to the presence in ambient air of a chemical pollutant, of the exhaust gas type, or is due to the noise produced by the engines and the motion of the vehicles.
Today, the constant increase in motor vehicle traffic in the centers of large conurbations gives rise to atmospheric pollution which, for example, can in some cases reach a level such that it endangers peoples' health.
Already, certain local authorities have shown concern for this problem, and have attempted to install apparatus for monitoring air quality. Such apparatus is, in general, constituted by instrument cabinets provided with detectors and placed high up, and suitable for measuring the concentration of polluting gases that are to be encountered in an urban atmosphere. In addition to being very voluminous, complex, and costly, known monitoring apparatus suffers from the drawback that the number of installed items of such apparatus is very small, in the range 1 to 10 items of apparatus in any one town or city, and the geographical distribution of pollution cannot therefore be determined accurately. In addition, such apparatus measures pollution as a whole, regardless of its origin. In particular, especially because of the height at which the detectors are situated, it is not possible to determine the pollution actually suffered by the people in town, or the proportion of the pollution that is generated by motor vehicles. Finally, current monitoring apparatus merely records pollutant concentration measurements during the day so that they can be centrally processed at a later date, without it being possible to react in real time, within an acceptable time limit, when pollution peaks are reached.